Cyanogen, creators of the most popular Android ROM, have recently announced that they have just hit the 50 million user barrier, surpassing Windows Phone and Blackberry numbers combined. Adnan Begovic, a popular Cyanogen employee, has dropped this bombshell at the Seattle Code Rush, where he blew everyone’s minds with this amazing accomplishment. The news is even more surprising when you take into account that CyanogenMod isn’t even a standalone platform, but a modified version of Android.

The two leading companies in the mobile platform market, Google and Apple, both announced their new operating systems for the next year recently. While neither Apple’s iOS 9 nor Google’s Android M have been released yet (both will land this fall), the companies did detail their new software at length. With that in mind we decided to tackle which looks to be the most comprehensive update and we will try to decide whether one of the OS’s is pulling away from the other in terms of quality.

The 2000s was a magical time of new technologies finally seeing public light. Two major innovations during the 90s (and late 80s), finally saw their debut among the masses at the dawn of the millennium. The first, was the rise of the internet. The world became connected like it never had before. With network speeds rising from under 1 megabyte to over 1GB in ten years, society saw a surge of people glued to their LED screens to check out the latest and greatest from popular websites. The second innovation was smartphones.

HTC makes specific devices for different carriers and regions, even though most of the variants are packed with the same hardware features or specifications. CID and MID: Carrier ID and Model ID respectively, is what helps HTC to identify which particular carrier or region/country the device was made for. This also helps OTA (over the air) software update servers to know which update to push for your device when they become available.

S-Off means Security Off, and that is exactly what you need if you want absolute control over your HTC device. After unlocking your bootloader, flashing a custom recovery and successfully rooting your device, if you want to hack your device even further, then you would need S-Off.

Rooting your android device is overwriting commands to attain admin privileges or “attain the key to have access to the backroom” of your android device. This key, known as root access will give you the privilege to read and write/alter folders and system partitions which are hidden by default.

Unlocking your bootloader is to partially remove some of the default restrictions in the ROM of your device: to have access to overwrite commands, mount, read and write system partitions. Be reminded however, “that not all claims resulting or caused by or from the unlocking of the bootloader may be covered under warranty – HTC.”